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The Ineluctable, the Kosmic Law is, thus, rooted in a natural
principle under which each several entity is overruled to go,
duly and in order, towards that place and Kind to which it
characteristically tends, that is towards the image of its primal
choice and constitution.
In that archetypal world every form of soul is near to the image
[the thing in the world of copy] to which its individual
constitution inclines it; there is therefore no need of a sender
or leader acting at the right moment to bring it at the right
moment whether into body or into a definitely appropriate body:
of its own motion it descends at the precisely true time and
enters where it must. To every Soul its own hour; when that
strikes it descends and enters the body suitable to it as at the
cry of a herald; thus all is set stirring and advancing as by a
magician's power or by some mighty traction; it is much as, in
any living thing, the soul itself effects the fulfillment of the
natural career, stirring and bringing forth, in due season, every
element- beard, horn, and all the successive stages of tendency
and of output- or, as it leads a tree through its normal course
within set periods.
The Souls go forth neither under compulsion nor of freewill; or,
at least, freedom, here, is not to be regarded as action upon
preference; it is more like such a leap of the nature as moves
men to the instinctive desire of sexual union, or, in the case of
some, to fine conduct; the motive lies elsewhere than in the
reason: like is destined unfailingly to like, and each moves
hither or thither at its fixed moment.
Even the Intellectual-Principle, which is before all the kosmos,
has, it also, its destiny, that of abiding intact above, and of
giving downwards: what it sends down is the particular whose
existence is implied in the law of the universal; for the
universal broods closely over the particular; it is not from
without that the law derives the power by which it is executed;
on the contrary the law is given in the entities upon whom it
falls; these bear it about with them. Let but the moment arrive,
and what it decrees will be brought to act by those beings in
whom it resides; they fulfil it because they contain it; it
prevails because it is within them; it becomes like a heavy
burden, and sets up in them a painful longing to enter the realm
to which they are bidden from within.
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